Cuando la directora Jen Rodgers tomó una licencia sabática de 10 semanas en 2021, su misión era encontrar una manera de mejorar la instrucción de matemáticas en la escuela primaria que lidera aquí en una de las ciudades más antiguas del país.
Rodgers, quien ha dirigido la Escuela St. Clair de 420 estudiantes desde 2016, no está sola en preocuparse por las “matemáticas”. Las puntuaciones de matemáticas en pruebas internacionales han estado estancadas o disminuyendo durante años en Nueva Zelanda y muchos otros países, con la excepción de algunas naciones asiáticas como Singapur, Taiwán y Japón.
“Como sector, estamos siendo bombardeados con informes de nuestros fracasos en la enseñanza de matemáticas, lo que deja a los maestros y directores de todo el país sintiéndose inciertos sobre qué hacer y cómo enseñar matemáticas de manera efectiva”, escribió Rodgers en un informe a su comunidad escolar al final de la licencia sabática. Pero su informe también señaló que los educadores han sido decepcionados antes por varias iniciativas que no lograron cambiar las puntuaciones de logro matemático del país.
“¿En quién o en qué confiar ahora?”, escribió.
En Nueva Zelanda, donde las escuelas operan de manera mucho más independiente que las escuelas públicas tradicionales en los Estados Unidos, sería responsabilidad de directores como Rodgers determinar la mejor manera de enseñar los estándares matemáticos del país.
No más. Grandes cambios se avecinan en las escuelas de Nueva Zelanda a partir de este mes, el comienzo del año escolar de cuatro trimestres del país.
El país ya estaba en proceso de implementar un nuevo conjunto de estándares matemáticos; ese trabajo ahora se ha acelerado.
En la Escuela St. Clair en Dunedin, Nueva Zelanda, las lecciones de matemáticas a menudo implican escribir en superficies borrables en grupos pequeños, para promover la participación y minimizar la vergüenza por los errores. Crédito: Becki Moss para The Hechinger Report
El Ministerio de Educación también está diciendo a los educadores cómo deben enseñar el plan de estudios, requiriendo un cambio hacia la instrucción “estructurada”, dijo la Ministra de Educación Erica Stanford.
“Las matemáticas estructuradas se basan en la ciencia del aprendizaje, que es la que engloba todas nuestras áreas curriculares. Y realmente no es diferente a la alfabetización estructurada”, dijo Stanford en una entrevista el año pasado con Newsroom, un medio de comunicación de Nueva Zelanda. “Es enseñanza explícita, de manera estructurada, dominando los conceptos básicos antes de avanzar, y luego asegurándonos de evaluar en el camino para asegurarnos de que están en el buen camino”.
La política se aplicaría a estudiantes de la escuela primaria, equivalente a jardín de infantes hasta séptimo grado en los EE. UU.
En noviembre, el ministerio lanzó una nueva guía curricular que hace referencia frecuente a la “enseñanza explícita”, descrita en parte como contenido “desglosado en pasos manejables, cada uno de los cuales es claramente y concisamente explicado y modelado por el maestro”. Esta enseñanza, dice la guía, también incluye “discusiones enriquecedoras” y “resolución de problemas significativa”.
Ann Pethybridge enseña fracciones a una clase mixta de años 2 y 3, equivalente a primero y segundo grado, en la Escuela Beach Haven en Auckland, Nueva Zelanda. Crédito: Becki Moss para The Hechinger Report
El país también planea destinar $20 millones en desarrollo profesional para ayudar a los maestros a realizar el cambio. Y en otro cambio de política, los estudiantes que deseen inscribirse en un programa de formación de maestros en las universidades de Nueva Zelanda deben tener credenciales matemáticas más sólidas de las que se requerían anteriormente.
Si la avalancha de cambios en Nueva Zelanda logra mover la aguja en el logro matemático, es probable que su éxito repercuta mucho más allá de sus fronteras, incluso en los Estados Unidos, que tiene 10 veces más niños en la escuela pública (alrededor de 49 millones) que habitantes en Nueva Zelanda.
Such influence has happened before: America has spent millions on Reading Recovery, a one-on-one reading program for first graders developed in New Zealand. (Reading Recovery was criticized for not providing enough explicit instruction in decoding words; New Zealand is set to end government funding of the program.)
Related: Mathematics scores in some countries have been dropping for years, even as the subject grows in importance
The nation’s shift on mathematics comes with some controversy. The government made a rightward shift in 2023 to the National Party, ending six years of leadership under former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who had an international profile.
The National Party campaigned on a back-to-basics approach for education, which, in addition to the changes in mathematics instruction, has included backing a move to “structured literacy,” banning cell phones in schools and requiring more testing to gauge students’ academic progress.
For some schools, the structured approach to mathematics described in the new curriculum will be a shift from the small group, project-based instruction now used to teach the subject. And, in a country where principals have the kind of autonomy superintendents do in the U.S. — each of New Zealand’s more than 2,500 government-funded schools has its own board that sets policy and manages budgets — the entire effort is a more top-down approach than educators are used to. Some school leaders have called the pace of the overhaul “insane.”
Teacher Simrat Dhillon uses “fairy bread,” buttered bread with colorful sprinkles, to teach fractions to her Year 3 students — the same as U.S. second graders — at Beach Haven School in Auckland, New Zealand. Credit: Becki Moss for The Hechinger Report
Rodgers said she’s glad that mathematics is a priority for the government, but worries “about the capacity for principals to manage this on top of all the other things they do. Some professionals may leave the workforce because of the pressure and added work.
“In saying that, though, we simply must do something different in the teaching of math,” said Rodgers, who is a member of the executive committee of the New Zealand Principals’ Federation, a national professional group for principals. “The status quo is not good enough across the sector, although most schools will say their students are achieving well.”
The Ministry of Education announced the changes to mathematics instruction soon after the August release of a national study that gave a sobering assessment of students’ math skills. The Curriculum Insights and Progress Study, much like the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the United States, tests a sample of students in different grades. It found that 22 percent of the country’s Year 8 students were at or above mathematics benchmarks.
The study’s authors said the scores were not significantly different from previous years, and did not show evidence of improvement or decline.
Fracción tiles are among the hands-on objects used in Ulrike Matthews class of Year 3 and 4 students at May Road School in Auckland, New Zealand. Credit: Becki Moss for The Hechinger Report
However, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon called the results a sign of a “total system failure.”
Other tests given in New Zealand have shown that students who are members of the country’s indigenous Māori population score lower than their Pākehā — white — or Asian peers in mathematics. The same is true for students who are Pasifika, the New Zealand term for people descended from indigenous groups in Samoa, Tonga and other nations in the Pacific Islands.
On the international stage, New Zealand’s status in mathematics is mixed. On the Program for International Student Assessment, for example, the country scores above the international average — and above the United States — but those scores have been slipping.
On another international mathematics test, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, New Zealand ranks below the United States for fourth graders and about the same for eighth graders. The scores among 9- to 10-year-olds and 13- to 14-year-olds were relatively steady between 2019 and 2023, but New Zealand had one of the highest achievement gaps between affluent and disadvantaged students on the mathematics portion of the test.
At May Road School in Auckland, students in Years 3 and 4, equivalent to second and third grade in the United States, work on fractions. Credit: Becki Moss for The Hechinger Report
“We’re all really distressed about the outcomes of our system at the moment,” said Fiona Ell, a professor of curriculum and pedagogy at the University of Auckland, who also served on the government advisory panel about improving mathematics and literacy instruction. “We all want to fix it.”
But, “thrashing about, saying ‘this is good, this is bad,’ just swings the pendulum back and forth,” she said. “And on the way back, it just knocks over all the poor teachers.”
Related: 6 observations from a devastating international math test
The latest efforts aren’t the first time New Zealand has tried major mathematics teaching reforms.
For example, between 2000 and 2009, the government promoted the Numeracy Development Project, intended to help teachers give students a conceptual understanding of math. Critics said it slowed down instruction in techniques such as adding and subtracting numbers in columns.
“At the time we thought that would be the silver bullet that solved all the problems of maths, and we know 20 years later that it didn’t,” said Rodgers, the St. Clair principal, who helped provide professional development to teachers during the Numeracy Project years.
At May Road School in Auckland, New Zealand, students work with slips of paper cut into fractions as part of a math lesson. Credit: Becki Moss for The Hechinger Report
School leaders are also creating their own paths to math success, many focusing on processes in which teachers serve as guides to student learning and collaboration.
Rodgers, for example, encouraged her staff to adopt practices described in “Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics,” by Canadian math professor Peter Liljedahl.
The book’s themes resonated with her, she said. Liljedahl describes a “thinking classroom” as one where children collaborate in small groups and work on surfaces that can be easily erased, such as whiteboards with markers, so that they won’t be afraid of showing their work or making mistakes.
A recent visit to Rodgers’ school showed these techniques in action. Like many school buildings in New Zealand, St. Clair is open-concept, or what the country calls a “modern learning environment,” built with classrooms facing an airy central atrium. Sliding glass panels can be used to separate classrooms from one another, or opened up to allow large groups of students to work together. (Like other school reforms, modern learning environments have their own detractors; some schools are adding walls to create more traditional spaces that are considered less noisy and distracting.)
Brigid Fyfe, who teaches Years 3 and 4, equivalent to second and third grade in the U.S., started her class’s math lesson with the “Big Numbers” song on YouTube to introduce children to numbers from 1 to a trillion.
Students then worked on multiplication tables before splitting off into groups to work out problems on the floor-to-ceiling classroom windows with special markers that can be wiped off with a finger. Asked what she liked about mathematics, one student replied, “Everything.”
“One of the bedrocks of what we do is learner agency,” Rodgers said. “Our children are invested in the learning for themselves.”
Other schools have embraced “culturally responsive” mathematics instruction in efforts to boost the achievement of Māori and Pasifika students.
Ulrike Matthews gives a fraction lesson to her class at May Road School in Auckland, New Zealand. Credit: Becki Moss for The Hechinger Report
In the Auckland suburb of Mount Roskill, nearly 900 miles north of Dunedin, Ulrike Matthews’ mixed classroom of Years 3 and 4 students at May Road School tackled fractions using a curriculum called Developing Mathematical Inquiry Communities, or DMIC, used in more than 100 schools around the country. Around 70 percent of May Road’s 190 students identify as Pasifika and 22 percent as Māori (students may identify in one or more race or ethnic group).
Related: One state tried algebra for all eighth graders. It hasn’t gone well
The math curriculum the school uses keeps them engaged and unafraid to ask questions and make mistakes, said Arina Kumar, who teaches 5- and 6-year-olds.
“We get them into groups and we show there’s not only one way of solving the problem — there’s many ways,” Kumar said. “We support them, we talk to them, we have seen what they can do.”
At Beach Haven Primary School, located in a park-filled northwestern suburb of Auckland, teachers also use the DMIC curriculum for math instruction.
“They still do learn the facts, but it’s done in a fun way,” said Anoushka Dallow, the deputy principal. “You don’t hear, ‘I hate maths.”
A graphing exercise posted in a classroom at St. Clair School in Dunedin, New Zealand, shows how math and statistics are woven together in the country’s learning standards. Credit: Becki Moss for The Hechinger Report
Jodie Hunter, a professor at New Zealand’s Massey University and a co-leader of the DMIC project, thinks the current nudge towards structured instruction seems “ridiculous” when children need a variety of teaching methods to learn mathematics.
Hunter has her own experience with reports meant to guide government action: She was a member of the 2021 independent panel that recommended sweeping changes in how mathematics should be taught in the country. That panel advocated for better teacher training and high-quality materials, among other ideas.
“We’ve had a lack of support from successive governments in supporting teachers,” Hunter said. “Teachers are not treated like professionals, when they’re one of our best resources.”
But the curriculum and methods that New Zealand has used to teach math in the past have failed, and the proof is in the test scores, said Tanya Evans, a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland in the Department of Mathematics. Since 2017, Evans has led a special interest section of the New Zealand Mathematical Society Education Group focused on improving math teaching.
St. Clair School students in Years 3 and 4, equivalent to second and third grade in the United States, practice a math lesson in Brigid Fyfe’s classroom in Dunedin, New Zealand. Credit: Becki Moss for The Hechinger Report
She said the profession has been captured by the ideas that teachers should be guides to students as they discover mathematical principles. In contrast, she believes students should practice until fundamental knowledge is automatic before taking on more complex questions.
“This desire to bring inquiry as the first thing you do in the classroom and everything falls into place — what’s the evidence for that?” she said.
The new curriculum requirements, on the other hand, represent a dramatic shift for the better, she said.
“This is a significant victory for the Science of Learning, and I can hardly believe that this has been accomplished in such a short timeframe. I genuinely thought it would take a decade or two to shift the pendulum back toward sanity,” Evans said in an email.
In follow-up interviews after the Ministry of Education released its plans to change instructional methods, several school leaders said they did not plan to deviate from what they assert is already working well for their students.
“This is an example of politics reaching into our classrooms. We have long advocated that education should not be treated like a political football with the swings from one ideology to another. It is disruptive for the sector and does not benefit our children,” said Lynda Stuart, the principal of May Road School.
Students in Years 1 and 2, the equivalent of kindergarten and first grade in the U.S., prepare for a math lesson at St. Clair School in Dunedin, New Zealand. Credit: Becki Moss for The Hechinger Report
The culturally responsive curriculum the school has been using “works for our children,” Stuart added. “I am not planning on making changes to the way that we work.”
For Stephanie Thompson, the principal at Beach Haven, one question is how the government plans to support all the changes that it has in place, through practices such as ongoing professional development, math coaching for teachers, and data analysis to see where students are struggling. Her school already has those practices in place, she said.
“I don’t care who’s in government, if the policy they chase doesn’t incorporate these things then it’s not going to be the silver bullet they profess it to be,” Thompson said in an email.
Ell, the University of Auckland professor, said teachers are still likely to use a variety of techniques based on the children that they have in front of them and the knowledge that they want students to take away from a particular lesson. Even in a small country, individual teachers and their choices are key, she said.
“People think ‘balance’ is a real copout,” Ell said. “But we’re much better off building a view of teachers as professional decision-makers who can be trusted.”
Contact Christina A. Samuels at 212-678-3635 or [email protected]
This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.
This story about New Zealand mathematics was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based